Two studies investigated differences in the comprehension and production of words in 2-year-old children and adults. Study 1 compared children's speaking and understanding of the names of 12 novel objects presented over three weekly sessions. Study 2 tested adults' performance under similar training and testing conditions over two sessions. The…

In this study, the development of comprehension of essential and nonessential aspects of counting is examined in children ranging from 5 to 8 years of age. Essential aspects, such as logical rules, and nonessential aspects, including conventional rules, were studied. To address this, we created a computer program in which children watched counting…

The ability to monitor understanding of texts, usually referred to as metacomprehension accuracy, is typically quite poor in adult learners; however, recently interventions have been developed to improve accuracy. In two experiments, we evaluated whether generating delayed keywords prior to judging comprehension improved metacomprehension accuracy…

Children use goal-directed motion to classify agents as living things from early in infancy. In the current study, we asked whether preschoolers are flexible in their application of this criterion by introducing them to robots that engaged in goal-directed motion. In one case the robot appeared to move fully autonomously, and in the other case it…

The domain of figurative language comprehension was used to probe the developmental relation between language and cognition in typically developing individuals and individuals with Williams syndrome. Extending the work of Vosniadou and Ortony, the emergence of nonliteral similarity and category knowledge was investigated in 117 typically…

An eye tracking methodology was used to evaluate 3- and 4-year-old children's sensitivity to speaker affect when resolving referential ambiguity. Children were presented with pictures of three objects on a screen (including two referents of the same kind, e.g., an intact doll and a broken doll, and one distracter item), paired with a prerecorded…

We investigated children's understanding of directed motion events using an imitation choice paradigm. A total of 34 children (mean age 33 months) watched a model act out an event containing a manner of motion (hopping or sliding), a motion path (up or down a ramp), and a goal (in or on a bowl). On the children's apparatus, the locations of the…

In an investigation of comprehension strategies in young children, children in R. Brown's Stages I, II, and III responded to commands varying in length, grammaticality, and meaning. (SB)

Investigated preschool children's understanding of temporal relationships in terms of their comprehension of sentences containing clauses linked by "before" and "after". Also evaluated was the relative importance of order of mention and main-subordinate relations strategies in children's interpretation of temporal order information. (Author/SDH)

Presents a reply to and an analysis of a study which examined the use of logograph research to determine children's cognitive integration ability. The study in question had been based on the present author's previous research. (BD)

A total of 28 children were tested for comprehension of spatial antonym pairs with arrays which contained four objects representing both members of two antonym pairs. The results supported a modified semantic-feature hypothesis, in which polarity is acquired before dimension. (Author/LLK)

Results indicate that (1) comprehension of direct and indirect directives improves between the ages of three and six; (2) comprehension of direct directives appears to occur earlier and with greater ease than comprehension of indirect directives; and (3) context, or social situation, plays an important role in the comprehension of direct and…

A total of 96 children ages five, six, and seven were asked to judge the acceptability of eight three-sentence "stories" told by a puppet and to justify their responses. Stories differed in whether they were consistent or inconsistent and in whether the principle upon which the story's consistency depended was implicitly or explicitly…

This study investigated whether misunderstanding of metaphor is attributable to inability to discover the ground, the demands of a particular form of metaphor, or surface aspects of metaphors. Results indicated task demands posed by predicative metaphors proved greater than those posed by topicless metaphors. (Author/DB)

Two studies explored the following two issues important in understanding the development of knowledge-based inferencing: (1) how children of different ages use a circumscribed and available knowledge base to make two types of inferences important for comprehension; and (2) how the accessibility of an available knowledge base is related to…